Month: February 2017

One day during a team meeting at Joep‘s previous job at a bank the Team Manager of Testing, listed a number of topics his testers could work on in the coming months. One of those topics was “testing maturity”. This topic was on the list not because this manager was such a fan of maturity models, but because the other team managers (Business Analysis and Development) had produced one for their own teams and higher management would like to have one for testing as well. And although Joep saw little value in a classic five-tiered maturity model either, he was intrigued by the question: so what can you do with respect to maturity models that is of value?

Joep asked Huib to help him think of a way to create a valuable, context-driven way to work on maturity. Since Huib had been working for the same bank, they met and discussed the possibilities. Soon they found out that the criteria should be variable since maturity depends on context. They started experimenting with stack ranking and quite soon they had the first version of their “maturity model”.

Maturity or improvement?

After discussing the first version of the article with James and Michael, we felt the need to update our article. Their comments helped us realize that we needed to explore maturity and maturity models a bit more. After doing this, we decided to rename our model into a test improvement model.

Maturity mission: better testing

What is the mission a maturity assessment? We think the assessment should be a pathway to better testing. As a part of solving problems we think the mission should be: “An investigation of strengths and weaknesses. A starting point for a discussion about potential (testing) problems and how to solve them.” Or as James Bach says: A maturity model is plan for achieving maturity. And this is exactly what we created. Our maturity model isn’t anything like the staged, fixed models available in the market. Maybe we shouldn’t call our method a maturity model, since basically it isn’t. It is a tool designed to help teams assess and improve their testing. It is a method supported by a card game that helps teams retrospect and identify strengths and weaknesses in their way of working, the stuff they create, the team, their skills and context.

Result

After a first try-out at the bank Joep worked, we let it rest for a while. After a couple of months we wrote this article. It is the first version and it needs to be refined and polished. The heuristics lists are probably to long and need to be reduced. We think of this model as a card game that can be played with teams.

Currently we are also working on an agile version of this model, a card game for agile teams to assess their “maturity” to help them to find possible areas for improvements. More about that later.

We are curious about your thoughts. What do you think? Maybe you want to try the game? Feel free to try it out. We hope you will share your experiences with us.

“There is a saying that it takes a whole village to raise a child. Now we need a whole village to save our Linnea”

Linnea, Kristoffer Nordströms daughter, is five and a half years and comes from Karlskrona in Sweden. Her world revolved up until recently around My Little Ponies, riding her bicycle and popcorn… lots of popcorn. She who has one best friend: her beloved big brother Kristian.
That was her world – until a few months ago when she suddenly and shockingly became afflicted, and got emergency surgery for a brain tumor.
After the operation, we hoped that the bad news would end. But now the family lives in the hospital and has been told that the tumor is an aggressive variety called DIPG (Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma). The short story is that there is a heart-breakingly minimal chance of survival using established treatments.

There is a possible treatment that we are now aiming for: one that means the tumor is treated through catheters implanted directly into the tumor. Studies and reports show that such a direct treatment gives Linnea the best chance of one day becoming healthy. The cost of treatment and the journeys are very high. Higher than the average person can pay for: £ 65.000 for the first operation and then £ 6.500 for treatments thereafter. In the current situation, it is unclear how many of these Linnea will need.

We know a lot of people are waiting for this so me and Giedre want to give you the fantastic news.

Linnea had her third Intra Arterial treatment today and all went well without complications, this was the first time that we added the immunotherapy to the treatment, Linneas immune system is now being taught how to recognise and attack the tumor cells itself (Autologous Dendritic Cell Immunotherapy)!

The amazing news of today is that the treatment continues to do its job and we now see further shrinkage in the tumor from the last treatment three weeks ago.

The doctors see a distinct reduction in size since last time!

We now know that this is a treatment that is working for Linnea and for the other children here in Mexico, there are now over 30 families from all over the world here.

The treatment is very effective, but also very expensive, with the combined Immunotherapy and Chemotherapy the cost is 30.000USD (250.000SEK) every third week, later once Linneas immunesystem is trained the treatment will go back to chemotherapy only.

We realise we need to do this for an unforseen time going forward and looking at the costs of each treatment and our budget we need to ask all of you who have helped us get here to help us even further in saving our daughter.

Any donations, big or small, are more than welcome, you can help us at our fundraising site.

Thank you so much everyone who has helped us get here.

Swish donations from Sweden are also very welcome, the number is: +46 723 58 09 53